For many people trying to learn a foreign language speaking without an accent is the holy grail. The common perception is that unless you begin learning a language as a child you can never hope to learn to speak without an accent. While many find learning to speak without an accent (or with a minimal accent) is difficult, it is possible. Research carried out by Colin Rose in the 1970s and 80s indicated that there was a strong correlation between empathy towards a people and their culture and the ability to learn the accent. This indicates that if you like the language, like the people and like the culture of the language you are learning, you will find it easier to learn the accent. If you don’t like the people and culture, then it begs the question, why are you learning the language? If you have to learn a language then try to find people you like, or something about the culture you like. This will also help increase your motivation for learning the language.
However, for many of us liking the language is not enough to get a great accent in our target language. There are several ways you can improve your accent:
- Don’t rush to speak the language. Before you begin speaking, take time to listen to the language. Listen to songs and music in the foreign language, listen to any audio material you have in the target language. Become accustomed to how the language sounds before you start speaking it. The sooneryou become accustomed to the phonetic system, the easier it will be to speak correctly. Children will start trying to say mummy and daddy after about 4-5 months, and it will take another year and a half before they start speaking simple sentences. That’s a long time to grow accustomed to the sounds a language. You don’t need to take things this slowly, but start off with listening before progressing to the more difficult stage of speaking. While accustoming yourself to the sound of the language, just listen to the language, don’t make any attempt to understand it. Listen to the intonation and rhythm. The words will come later.
- Learn the phonemes. Often a foreign language will have different sounds which a foreign speaker will either not distinguish or finds difficult to distinguish from one another. For example, the Russian sounds of “с” s, “з” z can all turn into a generic s or z sound when spoken by foreigners as can “ж” zh, “ш” sh, “щ” sch merge together into a general sh sound, with foreign speakers either not noticing the difference in sound or being unable to make separate sounds when speaking. Similarly Japanese speakers find the difference between the English l and r to be difficult. You can train your ear to hear the difference between by doing minimum pairs training. Such training is often included in academic language training – but is often ignored in basic language courses, especially within the English speaking world. Minimum training is often used in any form of accent correction course. It consists of listening to different sounds or examples of words using sounds which are different but are often mistaken as being the same. Such practice teaches you to distinguish between subtle sounds in each language and should be done at the start of any language course to make learning the accent easier.
- Watch the face. Pay attention to how people speak, watch their faces, their lips and absorb how they are speaking. The facial muscles all need to be coordinated to create the right sounds when speaking. By watching how people speak we learn how to speak without an accent. In the back of our brain there is a special type of receptor called mirror neurons. These neurons are an important part of what makes us social beings. They perceive input and “reflect” what they see on your own body. This is why when you see that a family member is sad, you feel sad yourself, it is also the reason yawns are contagious, the behaviour gets reflected on you. In the same way, if you pay attention to how people use their faces when they talk, you will subconsciously experience the same use of muscles. At a subconscious level the facial features are associated with the words that are spoken and we learn subconsciously how to speak from other people. However, the degree to which we mirror the behaviour of people depends on how we relate to them. If the level of empathy is very low (which is a defence mechanism), then it becomes harder to learn the language. People who are hostile or fearful of the culture will find it harder to learn and to speak well. To some extent, your ability to speak the language well depends on your acceptance of the culture and your desire to “go native” and become a like the locals.
- To further develop a good accent get hold of audiobooks. These not only provide you with a rich way to experience the language but are excellent to train with. Purchase or download the audiobook and the book and then read the book as you listen to the text. This by itself is beneficial, but to really improve your accent, train. Take 30 seconds to a minute of text, place it on loop and listen to it several times, while reading the text. Then close your eyes and listen to it again several times. Then practice reading the text. Ideally you want to record yourself reading the text, then compare it to the original recording. After you notice the difference, record the text again and compare again. Keep repeating until you have a perfect recording. This technique improves your phonetics very quickly and will also improve fluency and intonation. It is one of the best techniques you can use to improve your foreign language. You can find audiobooks in your target language by doing a search in that language for “audiobook” and if the target language word for audiobook is the same as your own, then add the language (written in the target language), for example “audiolivre en français”, “audiolibro en español”, «аудиокнига на русском» Youtube.com also has many audiobooks available in various languages.
- Talk to lots of different people. Having one or two close friends to speak to is helpful, they provide you with a safe environment to practice the language, experiment with knew words and new grammatical forms, but in terms of accent development, close friends are dangerous. They become accustomed to how you speak, and they forget to correct you when you speak incorrectly. The more people you speak with, the more feedback you will get as to what is right, and what is wrong.
If you want to learn more great ways to learn and master foreign languages, purchase Peter D Campbell’s book Language Learning Secrets Revealed: How anyone can learn a language.
About the author: Peter D Campbell is a professional Russian to English translator and journalist with over ten years translation experience. Peter speaks fluent Russian, has a degree in Latin and can speak conversational French. He has written three books and two novellas, all available from Amazon.com.